Mapping wildfires

Near real-time boundaries

powered by Earth Engine

Ryan Galleher and Vanessa Schneider

Program Managers for Google Crisis Response
20 October 2020
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Crisis Response at Google
People turn to Google in times of crisis

Chennai Floods Superstorm Sandy Paris Attacks

India 2015 United States 2012 France 2015

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Crisis alerts on Google
Provide critical info when it matters most

Google’s mission is to organize the world's information, make

it universally accessible and useful.

In times of crisis, we aim to assemble the most useful

authoritative information, and get the word out through
products such as Search and Maps.

SOS Alerts can include rich map visualizations, news

headlines, and help & information from trusted authorities.

Search Maps

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Building better, visually rich alerts on Google
Available today on Search and Maps

Tropical storm forecasts Earthquake shakemaps Flood forecasts Wildfire boundary maps

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Investing in wildfire alerts
An opportunity to be deeply helpful during active fires

Increase in global wildfires

Observed uptick in the severity and frequency of wildfires
worldwide. In parallel, we’ve seen Search interest increase in
recent years (right).

Be more helpful to Google users

In moments like a growing wildfire, knowing exactly where a
blaze is underway and how to avoid it is critical. We can use
global products like Search and Maps to amplify trusted,
actionable info.

Deep partnerships
A lot of our product design is informed by partners to make
sure we’re truly understanding what information emergency Google Trends data for “wildfire” search
responders want to get out to people in times of crisis. interest, past 5 years worldwide
(as of October 2019)
Wildfires is a great example of this collaboration — more on
that next.

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New: Wildfire area boundaries
Available for the 2020 U.S. wildfire season

In 2019, we launched a pilot in Search. We collaborated

with third-party experts, like California Governor's Office
of Emergency Services (Cal OES) and Boulder’s Office
of Emergency Management. Work was done to ensure the
precision of our boundaries, and initial feedback was
positive.

In August, we added impacted area wildfire boundaries to

SOS Alerts on Search and Maps. People will now see the
approximate size and location right on their phone or
desktop. Coverage includes the U.S., with an eye toward
more regions in the future.

Search Maps

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Powered by Earth Engine
Visualizing complex data

Earth Engine provides out-of-the-box tools for visualization

of satellite imagery and geospatial data.

Used by scientists, researchers, developers and journalists

to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on
Earth.

Free access to public satellite image datasets focused on

wildfire applications, along with computing power to
process the image data, and display libraries to visualize
wildfire activity.
Image series showing smoke from the Apple Fire (California, 2020), captured by the GOES-
17 satellite and produced in Earth Engine.

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Insights from space
Using satellite data to create a wildfire boundary map

Leverages satellite data from the National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES
constellation of satellites to inform people of the
approximate area impacted by a wildfire.

GOES uses infrared sensors optimized for detecting

"hot spots" or large wildfires. That satellite data is
publicly available on Earth Engine.

We use the data along with the computing power of

Earth Engine to produce an approximate wildfire
boundary continuously as wildfires develop, in near-
Wildfire likelihood detected from GOES 16 [left] and 17 [right]
real time.

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Run your own demo
Using the Earth Engine Code Editor

We’ve created a demo in the Earth Engine Code Editor

to get you started. Follow the below link to
visualize each step of the process, and experiment
with different start and end times.

Look for comments in the code itself for additional

tips and tricks.

Link: goo.gle/wildfires-demo

Caption here

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Getting started
Available for the 2020 wildfire season in the U.S.

Run your own demo

Try it out in the Earth Engine Code Editor:
goo.gle/wildfires-demo

How-to on Medium
Read a step-by-step guide on our approach:
goo.gle/wildfires-guide

NOAA in the EE Data Catalog

GOES 16: goo.gle/ee-goes16
GOES 17: goo.gle/ee-goes17

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Thank you!

Geo for Good Summit 2020

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